FertiPROTEKT - The Network

What is the FertiPROTEKT Network?

Due to the increasing chances of curing cancer, the importance of quality of life after recovering from chemotherapy and / or radiotherapy is increasingly becoming the centre of attention. The fears about preserving fertility in young men and women are at the focus.

Thanks to advances in reproductive medicine, a variety of fertility preservation methods are now available. However, these techniques were initially only offered worldwide in individual centres with great expertise, so they remained unavailable to many patients.

Because of this, the FertiPROTEKT network was founded in May 2006. It now includes about 100 university and non-university centres and was extended to Austria and parts of Switzerland.

Since our knowledge about the damage to the ovaries and testes caused by different chemotherapy regimens is still very limited and the new fertility protection treatments, especially in women, need to be further optimized, intensive clinical and scientific studies are required. These can only be optimally processed in a network such as the FertiPROTEKT network so that alongside the care of our patients who are at the focus of our efforts, we also set many other important goals.

Our main objectives are:

Each patient of reproductive age should be advised about her fertility before and after a gonadotoxic treatment.

All effective fertility preservation treatments should be offered nationwide.

The treatments will be further developed and optimized then sensibly applied in close cooperation with oncologists of all disciplines.

The implementation of treatments is checked and optimised according to their effectiveness and costs.

The toxicity of currently used chemotherapies will be evaluated using blood tests before and after chemotherapy in order to use less gonadotoxic chemotherapy regimens in the future where appropriate.

The psychological stress and relief from counselling on and implementation of fertility preservation methods will be evaluated.

Since fertility preservation methods are to some extent not yet standardised, but their effectiveness depends heavily on an optimal technique, all named FertiPROTEKT centres have committed to follow strict standards and quality controls and to participate in scientific evaluation.